Humans are sometimes not nice. :(

[whit_merule]

Just wrote, for the first time, a scene that physically sickened me as I wrote it. No gore (well, someone gets stabbed in the shoulder, but he stays on his feet and blood isn't really mentioned), no weird extreme kinky stuff. Just people being... people. And they're the main characters too, people you like. And I can't tone it down. It isn't

Comments

[mistalagan]

Yeah, that's pretty much what you get for that, I guess. There's a tendency, too, to push up the rating for sex (nice, consensual, happy sex) and not so much for extreme violence, which…I dunno, I just remember some years ago watching a movie with my mom and her covering up my eyes for a not particularly explicit sex scene and doing nothing about the bit where a guy's arms get graphically sawed off. Of course, your situation is a bit different, since it's not explicit. And I might warn against upping a rating simply because characters are being characters-not all nice, and not at all nice-when you might not if it were the villain of the piece.

[whit_merule]

Clearly the solution to the rating problem is If You're Going To Write Violence, Also Write Sex (Though Probably Not At The Same Time Unless You're Into That), so that it's all NC-17 anyway. :)

Yes, I remember getting traumatised (as in, run outside screaming, have nightmares for months traumatised) when I was in after school care in primary school when they showed a movie that had someone's hand getting chopped off. Didn't matter that there wasn't blood and gore all over the place or the stump of a handless arm - it was still plenty clear to an eight-year-old what was happening, and the look in the prisoner's eyes before and the way he screamed afterward were quite vivid enough, thanks. I worked out much much later that this was Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, which is PG-13. I don't know that I'd have been much happier about seeing it at 13, personally

[mistalagan]

…oh, yeah, blame your brain. Have to use that if I get arrested:

"What? No, I don't mean I'm insane. No, it was just my brain. Not me. Nuh-uh. Yes. My brain. No, sir, I'm not trying to be disrespectful."

I had people watching the R-rateds by 10 or so in my classes, but that was with their parents (or, y'know, because their parents didn't really care); the school always tried to keep it strictly 'age-appropriate', however.

Wouldn't know what to tell you without knowing what it was.

…also, episode? Ummmmm…I was going to post something about it but it's not coming out coherently.

[whit_merule]

Was it something like 'eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?' That was mostly my reaction.